Daniel, I am Cc:'ing you because IIRC you are the maintainer. "Philippe Mori" <philippe_mori@hotmail.com> writes:
I have found a couple of "undocumented features" in operators.hpp:
1) The return values from a lot of the binary operators should be declared const, so that it is not possible to assign to the temporary object that results from the operation. An example:
if(!(a/b=c/d))...
Well, operators are generally defined in the same form as predefined operators and thus does not returns const objects.
You might look into the book "C++ Coding Standard" by Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu at items 27 and 55 in particular.
If operators returns const objects the many functions should probably also returns const objects.
As mentionned in the book, returning const objects disable some usefull construct on temporary objects (like calling a non-const member function) and might break some existing client code.
So for consistency, I think that boost operators should returns non-const objects as most librairies do (including probably the STL for complex numbers).
It was discussed in the past IIRC and Philippe's rationale basically captures the consensus here. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com